Solutions Architect Professional moves to five domains

Dates

• SAP-C02 is in use until 16 Nov 2026
• SAP-C03 is in use from 17 Nov 2026

Domain weights

New

• A new task for integrating AI and ML services: generative AI integrations, AI agent architectures (Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Bedrock Knowledge Bases), ML inference on SageMaker AI endpoints and RAG architectures.
• A new task for security and responsible AI controls: content filtering with Bedrock Guardrails, access control for agentic AI with AgentCore Identity, and human approval workflows with Step Functions.
• Serverless data processing pipelines, durable execution patterns (Step Functions, durable Lambda functions), service mesh (VPC Lattice, ECS Service Connect), ECR image scanning and lifecycle policies, WebSocket and publish-subscribe patterns, and multi-tenant isolation.
• Hybrid compute (EKS Anywhere, ECS Anywhere, Outposts, Local Zones) and IPv6 dual-stack migration.
• Data lake and lakehouse architectures, real-time and batch analytics pipelines, and cross-account data sharing (including Clean Rooms).
• Application authentication with Cognito and EKS Pod Identity, workload identities with IAM Roles Anywhere, and post-quantum cryptography strategies (ML-DSA, ML-KEM with AWS KMS).
• Data residency controls, compliance evidence with AWS Artifact, and threat modeling.
• Cost optimization for AI/ML workloads and cross-Region inference data transfer, and cost-effective observability.
• Multi-cluster container strategies for disaster recovery.
• Pipeline security scanning and artifact signing, multi-account and multi-Region pipelines, and evaluating AI/ML applications with Bedrock Evaluations.
• Monitoring for containerized applications, AI/ML workload metrics, synthetic transactions and real user monitoring, controlled remediation (circuit breakers, rate limits, exponential backoff) and automated runbooks.
• New in-scope services: Amazon Bedrock, Data Lifecycle Manager, MemoryDB, Security Lake, Verified Permissions, VPC Lattice, Application Auto Scaling, AWS CDK, Clean Rooms, Cloud WAN, CodeCommit, Cost Categories, Data Transfer Terminal, Distro for OpenTelemetry, Fault Injection Service, Local Zones, Resilience Hub, AWS Transform, Verified Access and Reserved Instances.

Removed

• Application upgrade path and delegating to AWS (from the old Domain 2, Task 1).
• Migration-tool security (from the old Domain 4, Task 2). AWS notes these ideas might still be implicit in other C03 skills.
• AWS IoT services, Amazon AppStream 2.0, Amazon WorkSpaces, Elastic Transcoder and Kinesis Video Streams are no longer on the in-scope list.
• Individual AI/ML services (for example Comprehend, Lex, Rekognition, Textract) are replaced by Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker AI as parent entries.

Changed

• Many granular skills from SAP-C02 were consolidated into broader tasks in SAP-C03 to reduce repetition. AWS says this does not reduce emphasis on those skills.

Exam format

• SAP-C03: 65 scored questions and 10 unscored questions, multiple choice and multiple response.
• SAP-C03: scaled score of 100 to 1,000, minimum passing score 720.

Sources

• SAP-C03 exam guide(opens in a new tab)
• Comparison of SAP-C02 and SAP-C03(opens in a new tab)

This is a summary of the pages above. Check the official exam guide before you book an exam.